Seagate Momentus XT hybrid hard drive review
Earlier this year, Seagate promised to flip the 2.5-inch HDD industry upside-down, but it wouldn't do so by using an SSD in sheep's clothing. Rather, it'd be doling out a new breed of hard drive, one that actually has a pinch of pure, unadulterated NAND inside for picking up the pace in certain scenarios. The idea of a hybrid hard drive isn't totally new, but the Momentus XT is one of the first hybrid HDDs to actually make it out of the lab and into the hands of consumers. The most intriguing aspect of the drive is the price -- at around $130, it's just under half as pricey as Seagate's conventional 500GB Momentus 7200.4. That uptick in price isn't nothing, but it's still far less than what you'd pay for a 2.5-inch SSD with half the capacity. We've already shown you the benchmarks, so we figured we'd slap this bad boy in our main rig for a few weeks to see if we actually noticed any real-world performance increases to justify the cost. Head on past the break for our two pennies.
The Momentus XT is a curious beast. It actually doesn't reveal its true colors when taxed in standard benchmarks, which makes a longer-term, real-world evaluation of it that much more important. You see, this 500 gigger actually has 4GB of NAND onboard, but given just how small 4GB is in relation to the other 496GB, the drive obviously has to be extra choosy when determining what goes where. Standard benchmarks will prove that a straight-up read / write on this drive is similar to any other 7,200RPM drive of this caliber. Frankly, there's no real gains if you're using the drive to shuffle 30GB files from server to server each day. The whole point of this drive is to make "the little things" snappier in everyday use for the Average Joe / Jane, largely by evaluating what applications consumers use most and then dedicating the NAND for those high-use apps.
Needless to say, there's not really a great benchmark tool out for that kind of work. This all sounds fine and dandy in theory, but the real question is how does it act in practice. We swapped our standard 7,200RPM drive (also 500GB) out for this unit, cloning the contents along the way. Upon boot, we noticed a 1 - 2 second improvement in how long it took to show us a useable desktop; hardly Earth-shattering, but a decent start. From there, we fired up Firefox, Photoshop CS5, Skitch, TweetDeck and iTunes in succession. Again, a 1 - 2 second improvement in total load time. But after using the apps for a bit, we shut our machine down and rebooted, doing the same song and dance all over again. And again. And again. We went through this process four total times, with each one getting a bit quicker when it came to load time. After we'd given it ample opportunity to grasp our preferred flow, we noticed a 6 - 8 second improvement in total load time. That may not sound like a lot, but percentage wise it's hardly worth sneezing at.
So, if booting up apps was quicker, how's about the actual in-app performance? We used Lightroom 2 as our main test bench here, selecting 300 RAW files and waiting as graphical representations of the color balance lit up in the corner. The difference here was striking. On the prior drive, it took a few seconds per image to display graphical elements about any given image; on the Momentus XT, they popped up instantly. One area where we didn't see such a huge increase in performance was during renders; we exported a 32GB iMovie project into a .mov file for easier transport, and the total time for the task to complete was essentially the same on both drives. Granted, we fully expected this type of behavior, but it goes to show that 4GB of NAND won't exactly alter your universe when looking at chores that require lengthy reads and writes.
All told, we'd have a tough time not recommending the Momentus XT, particularly the 500GB version. If you're in no need of that much space, we'd almost recommend saving up for a pure SSD at 256GB or less. But currently, the price difference between this drive and the half-as-big solid state drives makes Seagate's new alternative that much more attractive. We'd also recommend this only for those who are looking for performance gains in the simplest of tasks; opening your email client, sifting through images in Lightroom, switching between the ten apps you have open, etc. Comically enough, this performance-oriented drive best reveals its talents in the most mundane of tasks, but like it or not, that's what the bulk of us are buried in from9 8 to 5. If you've outgrown your existing laptop HDD, and you need a capacious replacement, the Momentus XT is an option that's worth the price premium in our estimation. It may not make your Core 2 Duo feel like a Core i7, but it'll definitely get your through the day with a few less pinwheels / hourglasses.
The Momentus XT is a curious beast. It actually doesn't reveal its true colors when taxed in standard benchmarks, which makes a longer-term, real-world evaluation of it that much more important. You see, this 500 gigger actually has 4GB of NAND onboard, but given just how small 4GB is in relation to the other 496GB, the drive obviously has to be extra choosy when determining what goes where. Standard benchmarks will prove that a straight-up read / write on this drive is similar to any other 7,200RPM drive of this caliber. Frankly, there's no real gains if you're using the drive to shuffle 30GB files from server to server each day. The whole point of this drive is to make "the little things" snappier in everyday use for the Average Joe / Jane, largely by evaluating what applications consumers use most and then dedicating the NAND for those high-use apps.
Needless to say, there's not really a great benchmark tool out for that kind of work. This all sounds fine and dandy in theory, but the real question is how does it act in practice. We swapped our standard 7,200RPM drive (also 500GB) out for this unit, cloning the contents along the way. Upon boot, we noticed a 1 - 2 second improvement in how long it took to show us a useable desktop; hardly Earth-shattering, but a decent start. From there, we fired up Firefox, Photoshop CS5, Skitch, TweetDeck and iTunes in succession. Again, a 1 - 2 second improvement in total load time. But after using the apps for a bit, we shut our machine down and rebooted, doing the same song and dance all over again. And again. And again. We went through this process four total times, with each one getting a bit quicker when it came to load time. After we'd given it ample opportunity to grasp our preferred flow, we noticed a 6 - 8 second improvement in total load time. That may not sound like a lot, but percentage wise it's hardly worth sneezing at.
So, if booting up apps was quicker, how's about the actual in-app performance? We used Lightroom 2 as our main test bench here, selecting 300 RAW files and waiting as graphical representations of the color balance lit up in the corner. The difference here was striking. On the prior drive, it took a few seconds per image to display graphical elements about any given image; on the Momentus XT, they popped up instantly. One area where we didn't see such a huge increase in performance was during renders; we exported a 32GB iMovie project into a .mov file for easier transport, and the total time for the task to complete was essentially the same on both drives. Granted, we fully expected this type of behavior, but it goes to show that 4GB of NAND won't exactly alter your universe when looking at chores that require lengthy reads and writes.
All told, we'd have a tough time not recommending the Momentus XT, particularly the 500GB version. If you're in no need of that much space, we'd almost recommend saving up for a pure SSD at 256GB or less. But currently, the price difference between this drive and the half-as-big solid state drives makes Seagate's new alternative that much more attractive. We'd also recommend this only for those who are looking for performance gains in the simplest of tasks; opening your email client, sifting through images in Lightroom, switching between the ten apps you have open, etc. Comically enough, this performance-oriented drive best reveals its talents in the most mundane of tasks, but like it or not, that's what the bulk of us are buried in from





























Why is he holding it like a phone?
it's just under half as pricey as Seagate's conventional 500GB Momentus 7200.4.
I think you mean just under one and a half times as pricey. Just under half as pricey =45% of the price.
Your holding it wrong!!!! Hahahha your gonna loose the dater signals And give yourself bad sectors lol
I'm waiting for this to come out in a 1 tb config, then I'll definitely get one.
I wonder how well this would do with my HP Mini 311. To speed it up, I think I'd do better to get 3GB or ram instead of my puny 1GB, but I digress. Perhaps the next gen with 8-16GB NAND would be a better investment, no?
CMS has an upgrade kit with a Momentus XT and enclosure and transfer software to migrate OS, apps etc to the new drive here http://bit.ly/aJBdwR.
@Darren
Not to throw sand down your pants, but lots of customer reviewers say that after a while (ie 2weeks) the hard drive slows down completely and becomes null in void on speed. Want to confirm by letting us know what the speed of your hard drive is like then?
I've wanted to purchase this for quite some time but been standoffish because of that reason. I see it no point in paying more for a 7200rpm 500GB hard drive when it slows down and the 4gb memory isn't picking up for the performance boost.
OMG! Death Grip!
Be careful, it may spin down! Why? Well, every harddrive has that issue!
OMG! Death Grip!
Be careful, it may spin down! Why? Well, every harddrive has that issue!
@D0WN5ID3UP Sorry for the double-post :(
Well I've been using one for around a month now and honestly, things have definitely gotten snappier.
I would definitely recommend the drive for people with laptops who use it for internet browsing/email etc kind of thing.
My machine boots up a few seconds faster, my browser loads instantaneously!!! Everything seems more responsive.
The only concern I have is that my drive clicks randomly when no data is being read/written. :S
Which operating system did you use? Or are you not allowed to mention Windows anymore due to Apple. Maybe actually run the drive on Windows and OSX.
Now that would be fair but that's not what End'Gadgets about
@Excalibur
You can be pretty sure they did and Windows was better. Hence no mention of it.
Engadget all over.
@HKCally
right, because Engadget never mentions testing anything in Windows?
You're new here, aren't you?
Excuse me for being stupid. But if this fat credit card contains 500 GB, why are all tablet computers produced or announced still clocking in at a maximum of 32 GB?
@thelebrity
I has both regular hard drive and NAND memory.
@HKCally sorry again, but you lost me together with that first "t". Why is a NAND drive (not that I know what that is) preventing this hard disk from being used in tablets? Why don't tablets have 500GB hard disks?
@thelebrity There are two reasons. One is that standard 2.5" notebook drives are far too large to fit into a tablet. The standard thickness for these is 9.5mm. There are two other common thicknesses, 12.5mm (larger capacities available), and 7mm (for slim notebooks). The other is that rotating magnetic disks don't work well in something like a tablet, since you tend to move a tablet around a lot.
Tablets use flash for storage, since it has no moving parts. There's no particular reason that a tablet couldn't have virtually any amount of storage space, but consider this; my Intel solid state disk cost more than the most expensive iPad when I purchased it. So if you wanted to get a tablet with a lot of storage, get ready for the cost to go up quite a bit.
Editors! What about power consumption? Speed in laptop is just 1/2 the equation.
Is there a desktop version of this drive?
I stuck a 500GB one of these in my 2009 MacBook Pro a couple of weeks back, to replace the bursting-at-the-seams 128GB Samsung SSD. It's a lot slower than that was, but it's also a lot faster than the stock 5400RPM drives that come as standard. Definitely worth £100ish.
I was tempted to buy an XT, but unfortunately, this drive falls short in two important factors.
First, there isn't enough flash in the thing to serve significant amounts of data without spinning up the disk. I have a very light laptop (13.3" screen, 3.2lbs), and the current 7200RPM disk causes a decent amount of vibration. If the XT shipped with a significant chunk of flash, I'd be able to run with the spindle spun down for the vast majority of the time.
The second problem (and this one is actually fairly contradictory to my first reason) is that it doesn't spin up the disk soon enough. More detailed reviews show that the XT won't spin up until it can't serve a read from flash. The problem here is that you'll start doing something, the first few reads will be served fast from flash, and then your whole system will pause while it spins up the disk to serve the next few reads. What it *should* be doing is spinning up the disk *while* serving stuff from flash so that it's ready by the time it hits something that isn't cached.
@Guspaz Thanks for explaining so well. This is exactly what I experienced. There is a lot of people complaining about this issue. A firmare update (sd23) corrects the problem but than it was spinning up all the time. Not good for a Notebook battery!
I've had one of these drives for a couple of weeks now, and while it's noticeably snappier, unfortunately it's also noticeably louder than the (7200rpm) Hitachi drive it replaced and seems to use more power.
I'm pretty sure the latter issues probably have something to do with how Seagate seems to have completely and utterly disabled power management with their latest firmware update to try to fix another issue, there's an epic thread in the Seagate forums on it here:
http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Momentus-XT-Momentus-and/Firmware-update-Momentus-XT/td-p/56023/page/10
how much it is? it looks perfect for my netbook :D